I just watched the trailer for kingdom of Heaven on apple's HD gallery and I am lost for description. I can see the freaking grain of the cellulose! I can stream HD content in REAL TIME! Holy hell, a little less than twice the bit rate of a 640X480 MPEG2 file, and I'm watching full resolution HD. God bless steve jobs and the apple community.
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The Year of HD
- Thread starter SPUY767
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Steve did make a big deal about H.264, Quicktime 7, and Year of HD. I felt most people in the audience and in this forum didn't seem to fully understand the impact of what he was saying. I did though. 
About time. I have been waiting for HD since 1992 for crying out loud. Finally here!
About time. I have been waiting for HD since 1992 for crying out loud. Finally here!I mean this seriously has reached the pinnacle. I can stream these files off of the internet, technology like this could drive an expansion of the capacity of the internet if a couple more heavy hitters got behind it. I have seriously never seen anything quite as beautiful as the trailers I just watched. In addition, other internet providers need to get their act together like adelphia. I've got a 8k pipe running into my house. It's not the cheapest internet service around, but it's the fastest. If everyone could get a pipe like mine it would be absolutely amazing, there would seriously be a rebirth of the internet.
Sorry to rain on your parade, but you are not streaming HD content in real time. Apple's streaming trailers have resolutions of 1280 x 544 or 1280 x 532. To qualify as HD, it must be at least 720p. Apple does provide the trailers in HD format (1920 x 816). However, these are .zip files that must be downloaded and decompressed.SPUY767 said:
MisterMe said:
Don't mean to rain on YOUR parade, but 720P is a 16:9 aspect ration format, these movies are in 2.35:1 aspect ratio, meaning that they are 720P resolution, simple math, I know that there are some of you who struggle with this, but simple math yields that (720/9)*16 = 1280, which strangely enough is the exact horizontal resolution of the movies. Think before you speak.
Now, after dealing with that, at the sizes of the apple video it would be possible to record 1.7 hours of H.264 on a standard DVD, and 2.9 hours on a Dual Layer. Sounds to me like the only thing keeping HD DVDs from being released is ass dragging. A Dedicated decoder could process this video plenty fast, and the current spec media is plenty big. Let's get with it Hollywood, I'm ready for some HD movies.
I am just hoping they are going to make the decoding methog for H.264 more efficient (in terms of processing not capacity) so that those system specs can drop to fast G4's and not so good gfx's.
They are stunning, a lot of people, me included, have been stunned by the quality - i want more!
Come on Apple with the high def Quicktime movie store! But unless broadband reaches actual download rates of about 5mb per second i can't see it happening, oh my present 1mb connection (about 150kbs download i think) it would take just over 7 hours to download a high def Quicktime Movie. Although if i had a 1.5mb/s download rate it would actually take under an hour....hmm.
They are stunning, a lot of people, me included, have been stunned by the quality - i want more!
Come on Apple with the high def Quicktime movie store! But unless broadband reaches actual download rates of about 5mb per second i can't see it happening, oh my present 1mb connection (about 150kbs download i think) it would take just over 7 hours to download a high def Quicktime Movie. Although if i had a 1.5mb/s download rate it would actually take under an hour....hmm.
SPUY767 said:
I think you should think before *you* speak. If you are going to come off as a know-it-all you might want to be right, don't you think? You make a few poor assumptions right of the bat. Just because something has an AR of 2.35:1 doesn't mean it's 720P, and doesn't mean it's HD. Even though 16:9 (aka 1.85:1) and 2.35:1 are both considered "widescreen" 2.35:1 doesn't equal 1.85:1.
The two common forks of HD right now are 1280x720p (aka 720p) and 1920x1080 (aka 1080i). And Apple's h.264 trailers are, as another poster pointed out, neither of these.
Anyway, you have to look beyond the physical dimensions of the image when considering its quality. I can blow up MiniDV footage to 1920x1080, but that doesn't make it HD quality even though the image has the proper dimensions. Probably the two most common HD formats used by pros, DVCProHD and HDCAM, have respective data rates of 100Mbps and 140Mbps. And a higher end version of HDCAM, HDCAM SR, has a data rate of 440Mbps.
If you can stream media of that quality over the internet you have a killer ISP.
Just as a comparison MiniDV is 25Mbps, DVD's have a VBR between 1 and 9Mbps (typical is 4-5), and broadcast HD is around 19Mbps.
Lethal
Using QT Pro, export to DVCProHD and you should get completely smooth playback. It'll take up a lot of disk space but your G4 will have no trouble playing it. Use command-J to find out the framerate of the original video and make the export settings match it.dferrara said:It looks amazing, I just wish I could see it on my G4.
LethalWolfe said:
The Aimee Mann video is "official" HD I think (1280 x 720 and filmed in HD).
As a side note, Apple does describe the larger zip downloads as "1080 version", adding to the confusion.
LethalWolfe said:
Still wrong. You're not going to win this one, just so you know. The movie is HD resolution. Just because it's in a different aspect ratio and technically not an HD format, doesn't mean that it isn't HD. The flicks are simply not cropped from their original cellulose cuts, HD movies are. So unless you want to argue with the laws of mathematics, no cookie for you.
I never said that the videos were 720p, I simply stated, factually, that they had an equivalent horizontal resolution to 720p. I never stated that 2.35:1 was HD, I only stated that it was the approximate aspect ratio of these movies. You appear to be the one making incorrect assumptions. Oh, and BTW, I'm in video post production, so you might want to stop arguing over what I said because you're only going to continue being wrong.
The issue being argued right now seems to be the difference between representing 2.35:1 in a 1.85:1 frame, which results in black bars a.k.a. letterboxing within the frame, and representing 2:35:1 in a 2.35:1 frame, which has no letterboxing.
It makes sense to crop out the letterboxing for web delivery where the movie file will be played on a computer monitor.
It makes sense to crop out the letterboxing for web delivery where the movie file will be played on a computer monitor.
Rod Rod said:
Not really, the issue here is the guy doesn't like me calling is HD movie when it's not 720p. It has the same horizontal resolution, it just hasn't been cropped out to fit a 16:9 aspect ratio. It has the same horizontal resolution as a 720p, but it's technically not HD.
That's exactly what I said. It's too bad I don't use identical words to express the identical idea.SPUY767 said:
Let's go easy on the pissing contest, guys. Please review the forum rules in regards to insulting other members.
Thanks
Thanks
SPUY767 said:
Congratulations, welcome to the club. If only we weren't 2k miles apart we could grab and beer a talk shop. Oh well, my loss...
mcarnes,
Thanx for pointing that out. I'd only been looking at the trailers.
Lethal
Let's cut the crap and focus on the original point of the thread.
The Quicktime H.264 videos are simply stunning. I have a 120-inch screen in front of an old VGA (arg!) projector that is going into its 8th year. Seeing high definition video like this makes we want to jump to a DLP HD2+ DarkChip projector right away.
As for Steve's comment about 2005 being the Year of High-Def, well, it's not really turning out that way. We're almost half way into 2005 and NAB was a complete disappointment in the area of affordable consumer or prosumer-level HD camcorders. HD-DVD is still months away, but I still applaud Apple for at least setting up the computational stage for the impending arrival of High-Def (what we have now is just a smattering of HD technologies; I wouldn't call it an "arrival" yet).
The Quicktime H.264 videos are simply stunning. I have a 120-inch screen in front of an old VGA (arg!) projector that is going into its 8th year. Seeing high definition video like this makes we want to jump to a DLP HD2+ DarkChip projector right away.
As for Steve's comment about 2005 being the Year of High-Def, well, it's not really turning out that way. We're almost half way into 2005 and NAB was a complete disappointment in the area of affordable consumer or prosumer-level HD camcorders. HD-DVD is still months away, but I still applaud Apple for at least setting up the computational stage for the impending arrival of High-Def (what we have now is just a smattering of HD technologies; I wouldn't call it an "arrival" yet).
ksz said:
Not that this is on topic, but I don't see how Panny's new camera can be called disappointing (granted it's just on paper right now), and I'm not a huge fan of HDV, but the fomrat can produce some very nice looking images as long as you don't push it too hard.
Considering the cost of HD (to consumers, content creators, and cable/b'casters) I don't think we will have an "arrival." More like a s-l-o-w transition and one day we'll wake up and go, "gee... I guess everything is HD now..." More whimper, less bang. I caught the cover of Variety yesterday and Congress is getting lobbied again to push the deadline for digital b'casting back farther. Looks like it's going to turn into a race between Longhorn and digi b'casting to see who gets pushed back the most.
Lethal
This has more to do with pixel resolution on PowerBooks, but what's needed, I think, to breathe new life into the high-def transition (and I agree it will be a slow transition, not a sudden arrival) are:wide said:
1. HD-DVD playback hardware and movie titles at affordable prices.
2. High-def consumer and prosumer camcorders. Imagine shooting your travel or vacation experiences in high-def, or sporting events or life in general. NTSC is a dinosaur long past its eternal bedtime, and PAL...ouch, it's even worse.
If all we (we = non-Steven Spielbergs) can do with HD-capable PowerMacs and PowerBooks is playback QuickTime HD trailers from Apple's website, then...hmmm...find me another party to crash.
That will come in time. Like any new tech early adapters pay a premium. It will be interesting, though, to see how fast HD-DVD's take off. I really doubt they will explode like DVD, and I hope they don't tank like LD.ksz said:
Within 3 or 4 years I think we'll start seeing single chip HDV cameras aimed at the average Joe. The tapes and tape transports are the same as for MiniDV so there is R&D and production costs are saved there. You basically just need an HDV "front-end" slapped onto a current MiniDV recorder "back-end."
Will it looks as wonderful as full blown HD footage? No. But it will look a helluva lot better than any consumer camera out today.
I agree that NTSC needs to go away, but at least NTSC was one, consistent standard. HD (even if you limit it to just the professional realm) is a big ball of alphanumeric soup regarding all the variants there are. Options are nice, but it can turn into a nightmare if everyone involved in
post/production isn't on the same page and/or isn't exactly sure how to properly shoot and post HD.
One thing that everyone has to keep in mind is sense HD is soooo much bigger than SD (standard def) that it basically takes todays computers and rolls them back a few years. Don't expect to your computer to handle HD material the same way it handles SD material. We kinda "conquered" the SD mountain only to find ourselves at the base of a much larger mountain called HD.
It's kinda a funny cycle. We finally get really fast, cheap computers, and massive amounts of really cheap storage so handling SD is no longer a bear... and then we develop a format that makes everyone go "Ah crud. My computer is slow, my HDD's are small, and I need another $15,000 in new gear to properly handle this stuff."
Lethal